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What percentage of our computers are we able to program without using other fully-working computers to put the data in? What does this mean for the overall health of the system if there is a disruption, or software quality degrades?
In the minicomputer days, you had a row of switches on the front that you could use to input machine code to get yourself to a state of minimal ability to load more software. We just don't do that any more... https://i1.wp.com/avitech.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/11-70-front-panel-Medium.jpg …
Seems like a pointless thing to keep you up at night. I get the software simplification crusade you're going on, but... what is even your point, actually? That we should be using unoptimized hardware? In case all software magically stops working??
What is engineering about?
@Jonathan_Blow I've learned a lot from these few tweets. I never knew minicomputers used to have those switches, and I had never asked the questions you're asking. Just asking those questions is enlightening and puts me on a path towards understanding computers more deeply.
... because the switches were a giant pain in the butt. We replaced them with various BIOSes and never looked back. (All the switch input code did was tell the PC to read the boot sector from the floppy and execute it.)
Okay! And my point is, how do you write a floppy when your PC is not yet at the state where it knows how to write a floppy?
In all likelyhood the first 8" CP/M boot floppy was written from another computer and it all recurses back to the original mainframes with punchcards.
For anyone wondering, "How on earth did those switches work?", check out this really excellent demonstration of the Altair 8800 on deramp5113's YouTube channel. It blew my mind.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suyiMfzmZKs&list=PLB3mwSROoJ4KLWM8KwK0cD1dhX35wILBj …
I think this happens with almost every kind of technology. At some point, you need all sorts of specialized tools to create other specialized tools.
This rings true, but the key difference is that in mechanical and electrical engineering disciplines complexity is checked by reality in a much more harsh and immediate way. In the software world the unnecessary coupling of specialized tools and techniques is often artificial.
well now we have a minix hidden in a chip somewhere so if you're intel, the nsa (or huawei) you can probably still get some use out of a blank state pc.
My question is (a genuine one, not an argumentative one) would that system do with the bloat that the x86 set now has? Are the instructions needed to bootstrap it into reading something like an os from a USB easy enough to be inputed by the switches?
are you suggesting we are not making our technology ready for the imminent apocalypse?
Huh, I always wondered how that works. I guess I can't be blamed too much for not knowing if no-one expects any programmer to know how to do it anymore.
Well do we need this, for each and every computer to be able to be programmable on it's own?
Have you seen https://www.includeos.org/ ? I don't think you can get to that without another computer, but even in the worst case you will probably have access to another computer and a usb-drive for booting the binary!
there's a step-by-step rust tutorial on how to write your own OS. I never tried to do it, but looks interesting: https://os.phil-opp.com/
Small optimistic counterpoint: graphing calculators. At least with some of them you do have a fully enabled self-contained computer with just the device itself and its user manual. Some parts of the embedded world (not *cough* qualcomm) seem to be more robust this way as well.
I've recently decided to try to build a 6502-based computer from scratch. Perhaps a side hobby like that would be enjoyable to you too, Jon :)
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